The Google Search
- Try searches like:
- Cheetos manufacturing process
- how protein shakes are made
- Tony's pepperoni pizza ingredients
- McDonalds fries sourcing
- Ben & Jerry's CEO
Quick Evaluation of Search Results
- Look up authors, publishers, blogs/series titles of sites you want to cite by adding Wikipedia to a Google search on them; this helps give you more information on where they're coming from (intellectually, socially, politically) and understand the purpose and perspective of the information you're getting from them.
- Look for anything they say about where/how they are getting the information they are presenting. This can be either a formal citation or a narrative description (i.e., "When I reached out to the company about this, the representative told me...").
- Look for any purpose or agenda (selling a product, persuading you to take some kind of action, providing information on a particular related topic)
- Try to get an indication of how recent/current the information is.
- Bookmark several of your search results and compare them. Look for commonalities and differences across sites - do sites contradict one another?
Citing Internet Sources
In order to create a complete citation later, you will need to identify:
- Author. This can be an individual person, or if none is identified, it can be an "institutional author" such as a government agency.
- Title of individual article or post
- Title of larger series, blog, e-journal, or other serial publication
- Publisher (the overall entity or organization that is responsible for the content)
- Date the content was put online, if available
- Date you accessed the content
- URL (try to make sure it's not a temporary "session" URL, but a permanent link)
